The next morning as rain poured down and the wind whipped it into my face, I paddled off singing loudly “Seasons in the Sun” and keeping myself cheerful with thoughts of finding a cozy cabin where we could hole up for a day. Since we were far ahead of schedule, I figured we deserved a day off somewhere warm and dry. I found a perfect cabin with a stove and oven; it had three beds and even a table. What more could we want? The raspberry patch behind the cabin was loaded with berries and thinking all the while about raspberry jam on a hot bannock, I went out to gather a few. Just as I started picking, I looked up and saw Doug and Byron on the opposite side of the river about to disappear behind an island, conveniently blocking them for getting across the river or seeing me.
I swore vehemently, put out the fire, grabbed my few raspberries, and headed off in the rain to catch up. I put all my anger and irritation into energy to drive the canoe forward through the waves, but it took over an hour to close the gap, and by then most of my displeasure had dissipated. “Why did you guys switch sides of the river on me?” I asked.
“You mean you missed a shortcut? We thought sure you would go down that slough on that last big bend. After all, your middle name is ‘shortcut’.”
“I missed that shortcut. Wasn’t looking at the map. But you guys made me leave a warm cabin and a big raspberry patch.”
“Of no, you’ve got to be kidding. That’s terrible! Oh well, we’re wet so we might as well make some miles now,” said Byron.
And that’s what we did, on and on through rainstorm after rainstorm. I got far behind and wondered why we didn’t stop. The sun had already set when I pulled my canoe onto a soggy beach, and darkness squeezed the light out of the air while we sat around a sputtering fire, cooking supper in the drizzly rain. I fumed silently. Then I remembered the rainbows that followed each storm all afternoon. That was what counted, what we would remember. Not the rain, but the rainbows. Not the wind, but the dancing, sparkling waves.
As we slipped off to bed, an almost full moon suddenly broke through the clouds and cast a silver stream of light on the river. The soft light flooded our camp imparting a far-away ethereal look to the surroundings. The far shore appeared to be another world. Our tents seemed more like strange geodesic shapes from another planet than the familiar shelters we slept in every night. When a mother moose and calf wandered into our camp, they snorted with alarm and thundered up the shoreline, more in the water than on the beach. We listened with contentment to the ow] hooting a lonesome sound into the cold night.
Had the clouds not covered most of the sky, the temperature would have dropped well below freezing during the night. As it was, the air was pretty nippy. I pulled on my wool mitts for the first time since Great Slave Lake and prepared to go out on the river bundled in a thick wool shirt and windbreaker. After Doug pushed his canoe into the water, he turned and asked, “Byron told me yesterday that he wants to paddle till sunset every night. What do you think of it?”
“I don’t really like it too much. I’d rather camp while it’s still light. Besides, what’s the rush?”
“Yeah, I know, but I was talking to Byron yesterday, and I think he’s ready for the trip to be over. He’d just as soon keep going fifty miles a day, close our eyes for a couple of weeks, and go for the ocean.
That didn’t sound like Byron, but I said, “I’m still having a ball and have no desire to rush to the ocean. The journey will end soon, and I’ll be happy when we get to the end, but in the meantime, I’d just as soon have fun too.”
“You know, Byron might be feeling like me on the Mackenzie. I wasn’t having fun then, and I just had to get off that river. I figured you guys weren’t too concerned about finishing the trip so I considered going on by myself. Now it looks like we’re going to make it in plenty of time, and I don’t feel any rush now.
We caught up to Byron but neither Doug or I mentioned that we thought it might be better to slack up a bit. We went hunting for Horner Hot Springs where we hoped for a warm bath. After we trudged through the dense brush and couldn’t locate it, we returned to the canoe, and Byron got in his canoe without a word and paddled away. I looked at Doug, and he said, “I thought we were going to camp right here.”
“I figured that too, but Byron obviously didn’t.”
“Maybe we ought to say something to him and see if we can get him to slow down.”
When the clouds lifted in late afternoon, we saw fresh snow on the Kokrines Mountains and the first tinges of color in the leaves. Doug and I chased Byron till sunset once more. Camp was more enjoyable without raining, but I had put off washing my clothes for so long that my jeans stood up by themselves, and I had hoped to wash them in the afternoon warmth.
Next morning I mentioned to Byron, “Why don’t we stop a little before sunset. It would make a little more comfortable camp.”
“We’ve been getting up so late that we have to paddle till sundown to get any miles in. We haven’t been putting in much time on the river, you know,” Byron replied, a little upset at my questioning his judgment. He jumped in his canoe and took off with a little extra snap in his strokes. After only a mile we stopped at a fish camp. A young man Lanny came out of his canvas tent, and we chatted a bit. He gave us a big salmon, and as we turned to leave he mentioned, “If I had enough money, I’d hire you guys to – help me put my fish wheel together. I’m two weeks behind schedule, and I really need to start fishing a soon as possible.”
We put our heads together and, deciding it would be an interesting experience, offered to stay and help. He had all the logs for the raft that the wheel would sit on and all the other parts for the wheel itself. We figured it would take about a day to put it together, but we stayed three days before we got it turning. Lanny had come to Alaska six years earlier to do some backpacking and had liked the land so much that he stayed. He first turned to trading to keep him in money and for the last couple of years had lived at Kokrines, an abandoned town about 25 miles upstream. He was the sole inhabitant of the deserted town where he had tried fishing the previous year but hadn’t caught enough fish. He figured he needed about 2000 fish for his eight dogs over the winter, and he hoped to catch a few more and sell them.
We got the raft built and the axle in place the first day. Lanny was quite pleased with the progress, and we decided to stay another day. In the evening he showed us how he kept his knives sharp and how to fillet a salmon with two quick strokes of the knife. A pretty good cook, he cooked a salmon dish every night.
The second day we put the baskets on the axle and built a fence called a lead, which forces the fish to swim into the baskets. Because the day was cold and windy, I was glad not to be on the river, but then Lanny asked me to take his boat and go upriver a few miles to another camp and borrow an auger. So there I was, out on the river again.
I was getting a little anxious to be back on the river by the afternoon of the third day. We had pushed the fish wheel into the river and had it ready to start turning, but many things remained to finish before it would catch fish. I suggested, “Why don’t we be on our way? It’s going to be a couple more days before it will be catching fish, and I’d just as soon be on the river.”
“I’d just as soon stay at least another night,” replied Doug. I thought we were in no rush.”
“No, I’m not in a rush, but if we stay here much longer than we will have to rush. After all, if I had suggested a three-day layover while we were on the Mackenzie, you would have had a fit.”
About then we ran out of wire and the question of whether to stay longer was resolved, but we stayed the night anyway. Doug needed to fix the hinge on his canoe because the aluminum hinge had almost broken off just as Byron’s had back on the Mackenzie. Byron had bought a drill at Inuvik, drilled three holes in his canoe and attached a new hinge. But he had sent the drill home at Fort Yukon. Doug managed to jury-rig one by clamping a pair of vise grips onto the shaft of a drill bit. Then he turned the drill bit while Byron pushed down on the top of it with a piece of wood. A very long, slow process, but it did the job.
While Doug and Byron worked on their canoes, I wandered up the high bank into a birch forest where mushrooms dotted the dark forest floor. Rain had done one good thing for us; it provided a large quantity of mushrooms to eat and admire. Several large specimens of the handsome but deadly Fly Amanita grew near the sunnier edges of the forest. I had brought my camera and enjoyed a few minutes crawling around taking pictures of the colorful mushrooms.
I wandered into the quiet depths of the forest where trees crowded together shutting out sunlight. Nothing moved and dense foliage and thick undergrowth muffled every sound. I stood silently, holding my breath, waiting for something I did not know. I only knew something empty at the bottom of each breath cried out to be filled.